With over 50 hospital campuses in 9 states, Adventist Health System was one of the largest provider networks in the US. But, with several independently branded hospitals and hundreds of different online experiences under the parent system, Adventist had an identity problem.
To become a nationally recognized health leader, they needed to unify under a new brand and a single digital destination. On January 1st, 2019, as Adventist Health system became AdventHealth, we went live with the new AdventHealth.com platform; bringing 1,200 facilities, 796 websites, and multiple physician search and booking systems into a single, seamless Digital Front Door.
AdventHealth’s new platform was designed to put the customer first. From appointment booking to billing, AdventHealth and Phase2 worked together to create an industry-leading tech stack and website platform.
We prioritized open source technologies, such as Drupal 8, and selected systems based on how well they would integrate and share data with the overall platform. Where a third-party solution didn’t deliver the exact experience Advent required (such as physician search), we worked to augment and, in some cases, develop a solution from scratch.
By the time the platform launched, we whittled 28 different content management systems, 8 different physician search experiences, and 5 different CRM platforms down to a single Drupal 8 CMS, an organization-wide Salesforce CRM, and an on-brand and highly customizable physician search and appointment booking experience.
Physician Access
Above all else, customers want to find the right physician and book an appointment when and where it’s convenient for them.
Because of this, AdventHealth and Phase2 decided to rethink the look and feel of the entire physician search and booking experience.
From Kansas City to Tampa, customers now have a consistent yet highly customizable search experience where they can find providers and physicians based on a number of criteria, including distance, name, availability, and services offered/conditions treated. They also have the ability to filter physicians based on those that are accepting new patients, what insurance they accept, what languages they speak, and availability timeframes.
We also introduced real-time appointment availability and booking, as well as physician bios and ratings, integrating with Advent’s ATLAS middleware layer to pull data from the Athena EHR, physician bio, and credentialing systems into the Drupal CMS.
For those physicians not yet participating in open scheduling, a new universal form system using Formstack and Salesforce seamlessly passes customer information to call center staff, connecting patients with the right care, in the right location, at the right time.
In addition, it was crucial that each component of the new search and booking system integrate and share data, giving Advent’s digital team the ability to track customers as they moved from physician search, to website landing page, and through to booking, allowing them to track and optimize the journey and continuously enhance platform performance.
Empowering Marketing and Patient Care Teams
Throughout the project, we asked ourselves one simple question: “How do we empower Advent’s digital teams, and get technology out of the way?”.
For starters, we used Pattern Lab to create a component-based design system, giving Advent’s marketing team a library of on-brand components to create new pages, and sites, from scratch.
The team now has the freedom to work independent of developers, while ensuring the user experience is always on-brand and consistent across the platform. Next, we broke the Drupal editorial interface into four distinct sections, creating unique ‘products’ for different marketing needs and teams:
- Global Marketing - For general, Advent-wide marketing initiatives
- Individual Facilities - For individual facility marketing teams to manage their sites
- Custom Campaign Management (CAMP) - Used for small (usually 1-page) landing page-type destinations with a unique header or purpose, such as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, press releases etc.
- Microsites - Using design components and blocks, small sites with multiple pages and/or third level domain needs that can quickly be assembled - such as the Global Robotics Institute.
This unified marketing toolset gave Advent the ability to create everything, from simple site modifications to full microsites and custom landing pages, while leveraging the global design system to ensure a consistent, on-brand patient experience.
And with everything built into the same Drupal CMS, Advent’s marketing teams can tap into a pre-existing library of materials (guides, questionnaires, surveys, emails, etc) customizing only the elements necessary for that particular campaign.
As a result, best practices are shared throughout the organization, ensuring new campaigns are effectively pre-optimized prior to launch. Furthermore, it eliminated the need to train the marketing team to use another 3rd party tool. The marketing team can now build and launch microsites in a matter of weeks, rather than the many months it took previously:
- Site builds went from 6-9 months to under 4 weeks
- An individual institute site used to take 5-8 months to build out, now down to 4 weeks
- An entire hospital website can be built out in 3-6 weeks. Three additional new hospitals added to the platform in 2019 alone
- No developer resources are necessary for new site builds, freeing up the type of resources that are traditionally hard to plan for